Physical motion—pushing a button, laundry soap flowing out of a bottle, turning a knob, removing a hammer from a weighted tool bench—triggers gears and springs elsewhere in the 3-D printed object that cause a conductive switch to intermittently connect or disconnect with the antenna and change its reflective state. Information—in the form of 1s and 0s—is encoded by the presence or absence of the tooth on a gear. Energy from a coiled spring drives the gear system, and the width and pattern of gear teeth control how long the backscatter switch makes contact with the antenna, creating patterns of reflected signals that can be decoded by a WiFi receiver.

Here is a 3D-printed turtle that is classified at every viewpoint as a “rifle” by Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier, whereas the unperturbed turtle is consistently classified as “turtle”.

We do this using a new algorithm for reliably producing adversarial examples that cause targeted misclassification under transformations like blur, rotation, zoom, or translation, and we use it to generate both 2D printouts and 3D models that fool a standard neural network at any angle. Our process works for arbitrary 3D models - not just turtles! We also made a baseball that classifies as an espresso at every angle! The examples still fool the neural network when we put them in front of semantically relevant backgrounds; for example, you’d never see a rifle underwater, or an espresso in a baseball mitt.

To grow EpiBone, Tandon explained, scientists take a CT scan of the bone they’ll need to engineer. This helps them create a 3D model. Then, from the model, a 3D printer produces a scaffold (this can be made out of protein and collagen from animal bones or synthetic material). After that, they take stem cells from the patient out of their fat, and those cells are put into the scaffold and then incubated. They regenerate, and form around the bone. This process results in a bone that the body will recognize as the patient’s. The crazy part is that it only takes three weeks to grow a bone that’s personalized to the individual patient.

I would only recommend 3d printing to someone who wanted a hobby, and wanted that hobby to be 3d printing, not "having parts made on a 3d printer". The printing itself is the activity. If you have any other primary motivation your parts will fail more often than they'll succeed.

The last possibility and reigning theory is that Ms. Badri and Mr. Nelles elusive hacker partners are literally real hackers who stole a copy of the high resolution scan from the Museum’s servers. A high resolution scan must exist as a high res 3D printed replica is already available for sale online. Museum officials have dismissed the Other Nefertiti model as “of minor quality”, but that’s not what we are seeing in this highly detailed scan. Perhaps the file was obtained from someone involved in printing the reproduction, or it was a scan made of the reproduction? Indeed, the common belief in online 3D Printing community chatter is that the Kinect “story” is a fabrication to hide the fact that the model was actually stolen data from a commercial high quality scan. If the artists were behind a server hack, the legal ramifications for them are much more serious than scanning the object, which has few, if any legal precedents.

Professor Marc in het Panhuis at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science figured out that you can 3D print the paste and use it to carry current, effectively creating Vegemite bio-wires. What does this mean? Soon you can run electricity through your food. “The iconic Australian Vegemite is ideal for 3D printing edible electronics,” said the professor. “It contains water so it’s not a solid and can easily be extruded using a 3D printer. Also, it’s salty, so it conducts electricity.”

Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian born artist, educator, and activist [....] is working on digitally fabricating [the] sculptures [ISIS destroyed] for a series called “Material Speculation” as part of a residency in Autodesk's Pier 9 program. The first in the series is “Material Speculation: ISIS,” which, through intense research, is modeling and reproducing statues destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari isn't just interested in replicating lost objects but making it possible for anyone to do the same: Embedded within each semi-translucent copy is a flash drive with Allahyari’s research about the artifacts, and an online version is coming.

In this way, “Material Speculation: ISIS,” is not purely a metaphorical affront to ISIS, but a practical one as well. Allahyari’s work is similar to conservation efforts, including web-based Project Mosul, a small team and group of volunteers that are three-dimensionally modeling ISIS-destroyed artifacts based on crowd-sourced photographs.

"Thinking about 3D printers as poetic and practical tools for digital and physical archiving and documenting has been a concept that I've been interested in for the last three years,” Allahyari says. Once she began exploring the works, she discovered a thorough lack of documentation. Her research snowballed. “It became extremely important for me to think about ways to gather this information and save them for both current and future civilizations.”

I’ve been speaking to a few people [at Makerbot] who prefer to remain anonymous and most of my contacts there are gone (the head of PR was apparently fired) and don’t want to talk. But the new from inside is troubling. The mass-layoffs are blamed on low revenue and one former employee wrote “Company was failing. Couldn’t pay vendors, had to downsize.” Do I think Makerbot will sink? At this point I don’t know.

Balzer downloaded a free software program called InVesalius, developed by a research center in Brazil to convert MRI and CT scan data to 3D images. He used it to create a 3D volume rendering from Scott’s DICOM images, which allowed him to look at the tumor from any angle. Then he uploaded the files to Sketchfab and shared them with neurosurgeons around the country in the hope of finding one who was willing to try a new type of procedure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found the doctor he was looking for at UPMC, where Scott had her thyroid removed. A neurosurgeon there agreed to consider a minimally invasive operation in which he would access the tumor through Scott’s left eyelid and remove it using a micro drill. Balzer had adapted the volume renderings for 3D printing and produced a few full-size models of the front section of Scott’s skull on his MakerBot. To help the surgeon vet his micro drilling idea and plan the procedure, Balzer packed up one of the models and shipped it off to Pittsburgh.

When I get my hands on a 3-D printer, this will be high up my list of things to fabricate: a replica of a 20-million year old hominid skull.

With over 40 digitized fossils in their collection, you can explore 3D renders of fossils representing prehistoric animals, human ancestors, and even ancient tools. Captured using Autodesk software, an SLR camera, and often the original specimen (rather than a cast replica), these renderings bring us closer than most will ever get to holding ancient artifacts. And if you've got an additive manufacturing device at your disposal, you can even download Sketchfab plans to generate your own.

'[Create It REAL], which sells 3D printer component parts and software, recently announced that it has come up with a firearm component detection algorithm that will give 3D printers the option to block any gun parts. The software compares each component a user is trying to print with a database of potential firearms parts, and shuts down the modeling software if it senses the user is trying to make a gun.'

'A South African man who lost part of his hand in a home carpentry accident and an American puppeteer he met via YouTube have teamed up to make 3D-printable hands for children who have no fingers. So far, over 100 children have been given "robohands" for free, and a simplified version released just yesterday snaps together like LEGO bricks and costs just $5 in materials.'

'The results are startlingly good. This 3D printed skull [see pic] looks almost real. This is the print quality everyone will be able to access when Mcor’s deal with Staples enables 3D printing from copy centers.'

I like this idea -- a complete facsimile of King Tut's burial chamber. Bldgblog comments:

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“On the 90th anniversary of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, an “authorized facsimile of the burial chamber” has been created, complete “with sarcophagus, sarcophagus lid and the missing fragment from the south wall.” The resulting duplicate, created with the help of high-res cameras and lasers, is “an exact facsimile of the burial chamber,” one that is now “being sent to Cairo by The Ministry of Tourism of Egypt.” [...]
</p><p>
'Interestingly, we read that this was "done under a licence to the University of Basel," which implies the very real possibility that unlicensed duplicate rooms might also someday be produced—that is, pirate interiors ripped or printed from the original data set, like building-scale "physibles," a kind of infringed architecture of object torrents taking shape as inhabitable rooms.' [...]
</p><p>
'In their book Anachronic Renaissance, for instance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood write of what they call a long "chain of effective substitutions" or "effective surrogates for lost originals" that nonetheless reached the value and status of an icon in medieval Europe. "[O]ne might know that [these objects] were fabricated in the present or in the recent past," Nagel and Wood write, "but at the same time value them and use them as if they were very old things." They call this seeing in "substitutional terms".'
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I wasn't expecting to see this for a few years. The future is ahead of schedule!

A .22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper. In other words, the main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal. [...]

While this pistol obviously wasn’t created from scratch using a 3D printer, the interesting thing is that the lower receiver — in a legal sense at least — is what actually constitutes a firearm. Without a lower receiver, the gun would not work; thus, the receiver is the actual legally-controlled part. In short, this means that people without gun licenses — or people who have had their licenses revoked — could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun. What a chilling thought.